A difficult coffee year, with a late-season twist
Colombia’s coffee year, which runs from October to September, closed with national production down 15 percent to 12.65 million 60-kilogram bags, a fall of 2.22 million bags from the previous year’s 14.87 million, according to figures the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FNC) released on 9 October. Exports over the same period fell 12 percent, to 11.78 million bags.
The annual figure masks a more complicated picture within the year itself. Calendar-year production from January to September was down 10 percent, to 8.95 million bags, a steadier decline than the full coffee-year figure suggests. September alone, by contrast, showed growth: production rose 6 percent year-on-year to 1.215 million bags, and exports rose 9 percent to 1.172 million bags, suggesting the worst of the decline may have been concentrated earlier in the coffee year rather than continuing to worsen toward its close.
What the FNC is saying
Germán Bahamón, the FNC’s general manager, presented the year-end figures and said Colombian coffee growing “ends a cycle of lower production.” Looking ahead, he said climate challenges, the productivity of coffee farms, and the profitability of producing families would determine the country’s capacity to meet international demand going forward, a framing that places this year’s decline in the context of longer-term structural pressures rather than treating it as an isolated bad season.
The FNC itself exported 2.54 million bags during the year, raising its share of Colombia’s total coffee exports to 21.5 percent from 19.8 percent the previous year, even as overall national exports fell. Colombia imported 1.61 million bags over the same 12 months and consumed roughly 2.32 million bags domestically, figures that illustrate how a major coffee producer also maintains a meaningful level of coffee imports and domestic consumption alongside its export trade.
A season Colombia shares with other producers
Colombia’s decline arrives in the same window as steep output drops reported by other major Global South commodity exporters this season, including a forecast 16 percent fall in Ghana’s cocoa production and a sharp price collapse in Madagascar’s vanilla sector. While the specific causes differ, weather and disease pressure in Ghana’s case, price and oversupply dynamics in Madagascar’s, the simultaneous nature of these declines underscores how exposed smallholder-dependent export crops across the Global South remain to compounding shocks in a single season.
What comes next
Whether Colombia’s September rebound extends into the new coffee year will be the key question for growers and the FNC alike. Bahamón’s comments suggest the FNC is treating climate volatility as a structural, ongoing risk rather than a one-off cause of this year’s decline, meaning the measures Colombia takes to support farm profitability and climate adaptation in the coming months may matter as much to next year’s harvest as the weather itself. For a sector that remains central to rural livelihoods across Colombia’s coffee-growing departments, a single strong month is a welcome signal, but not yet a trend. The FNC’s own growing share of national exports, even in a down year, suggests the federation is positioning itself to manage that volatility on growers’ behalf rather than leaving smaller producers to absorb price and weather risk alone.
Related: Ghana’s cocoa sector and Madagascar’s vanilla farmers are facing comparable export-income pressure this season, for different underlying reasons.
